Genre

 This genre thing really bugs me.

I spend too much precious time and mental energy trying to crack exactly what genre my writing might fall into. I know genre is important for publishers and booksellers and librarians (I am, or have been, a librarian) so that they know what shelf to put the damn book on but, and it's a big but, it does not help me as a writer. It destroys my confidence and undermines my vocation.

The advice I received early on that, if it wasn't Romance it had to be Crime or, by extension, Thriller or Mystery, all but destroyed my first novel and I am left with the feeling that it is no more than a shadow of its former self - the former self being the novel it should have been, the novel I had imagined, the novel that wanted to be written. I feel robbed.

Children's picture books I get. Young Adult? I'm not sure I know where the boundaries are, at least at the upper end. When does YA become, you know, Romance or whatever? And then there is that catch-all Literary Fiction. Is what I write Literary Fiction? I would not want to claim such a distinction. Surely, it is a classification that can only be bestowed retrospectively by a readership or through the arcane labyrinths of Literary Criticism?

So what do I write? Looking around my local library, I cross off the shelf markings one by one: not Crime; not Saga; not Biography; not Large Print (well, who knows?). I write Life Stories. I write about people and how they deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves. I don't see a shelf mark that fits.

I'm left with the feeling that I am an outsider, that I don't fit in. That's ok. I guess I have always been an outsider. That is who I am so perhaps it is no surprise that my fiction defies categorization. It is what it is and it will be what it will be. And, no, there is not a body on the first page.

Oh! Wait a minute! 

There is a body on the first page. 

How did I miss that?